Sorting the dates
Melbourne is central to the history of Australian opposition to the Vietnam War, but the best-known events are not from 1967. The protest during President Johnson’s visit was in October 1966, and the very large Moratorium marches were in 1970 and 1971. The Save Our Sons organisation, formed in 1965, kept working throughout the decade. In 1967 itself, Melbourne’s story is of continuing organisation and argument, particularly about conscription, rather than of one famous demonstration.
Why conscription drove the movement
Australia introduced selective national service in 1964. Men turning twenty were chosen by a ballot based on birth dates and served two years, and from 1965 conscripts could be sent to Vietnam. As Australian Vietnam troop levels rose through 1966-68, the ballot mattered more to more families. Much of the opposition in Melbourne started with that fact, not with a general theory of the war. A mother whose son might be called was in a different position from a student who could be deferred while at university.
Melbourne also had a particular political setting. The 1955 split in the Australian Labor Party, centred in Victoria, led to the Democratic Labor Party, which was strongly anti-communist and supported the war and conscription. Disputes over Vietnam therefore ran through Catholic and Labor circles, trade unions and parish halls in Melbourne, not just campuses.
Save Our Sons
Save Our Sons, usually known as SOS, was a movement of women, mainly mothers, formed from 1965 in several cities, including Melbourne. Jean McLean was one of its best-known Melbourne figures. Its members did not mainly use rallies and sloganeering. They held silent vigils, often wearing sashes or holding placards outside places linked to the draft, and offered advice and support to young men who objected to national service.
SOS gained attention because it did not match the stereotype of a protester. Its members were often middle-aged, respectable and unwilling to be dismissed as radical students. Over time some were arrested or fined for their actions, and later they were involved in efforts to help men resisting the draft, including some who refused to register. The group’s claims about its own size varied, and no firm figure is given here.
Johnson’s visit, October 1966
When Lyndon Johnson visited Australia in October 1966, Melbourne was one of the cities with demonstrations as his motorcade passed. Accounts of the numbers and incidents vary, and many descriptions of the visit are dominated by Sydney’s better-known confrontation. What can safely be said is that Melbourne’s protesters included students, church people and members of SOS, and that the visit made the movement more visible. This was a 1966 event, and should not be placed in 1967.
Universities and the Labor Clubs
Melbourne’s universities were important centres of dissent. The University of Melbourne and the newer Monash University, which opened in 1961, had active student organisations, including Labor Clubs, which were often to the left of the parliamentary Labor Party. They arranged meetings, debates and teach-ins on Vietnam, published pamphlets and supported the draft resisters.
The Monash Labor Club in particular reportedly attracted national controversy in the late 1960s over its public support for the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, and critics in politics and the press attacked its members. Because accounts differ on the exact timing and nature of the club’s actions, they are not detailed here. As in Sydney, the activists were a small minority of students, and many others were indifferent or supported the government’s policy.
Draft resistance
From the mid-1960s a few young men in Melbourne refused to register or to serve. Court cases, fines and prison terms followed for some, and helpers sheltered others from the police. In the following years, groups sprang up to support such resistance, a development that grew more visible by 1968-71. As with the Sydney cases, specific names and dates are best checked in dedicated sources, because they are often confused.
The Moratorium marches, 1970-71
The Vietnam Moratorium Campaign was far larger than anything earlier. The first Moratorium day, on 8 May 1970, was widely reported as drawing around 70,000 people to the streets of Melbourne, one of the biggest demonstrations in Australian history up to that time. Jim Cairns, a Labor federal MP, was a leading figure in Melbourne. Further Moratorium days followed in June and September 1970 and in June 1971.
The Moratorium differed from the earlier movement in that it formed a broad antiwar coalition of students, clergy, unions, professionals and many ordinary citizens. Not all the marches were peaceful, and there were arguments within the movement over tactics, but the sheer size changed political calculations. By the early 1970s public opinion had shifted, and the Labor government elected in December 1972 ended conscription and freed those imprisoned for resisting it.
What 1967 meant
For Melbourne, 1967 was a year in which the movement stayed alive and the issue of conscription stayed on the agenda, but it was not the year of its major street demonstrations. In February Gough Whitlam replaced Arthur Calwell as Labor leader, which began to alter how the party approached the issue. The later marches grew out of the habits and networks formed in the mid-1960s by SOS, the Labor Clubs, churches and the resisters themselves.